Back To School...

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Does anyone else ever feel so stressed out when it is time for back to school?

I get soooo stressed. This year is a little harder because we {our district} has a brand new math curriculum and a brand new reading curriculum. Oh...and now I am self contained which means that I have to re-learn how to teach reading. As Robin from Batman would say... "HOLY KLEENEX!!"

The week before pre-school I attended a FULL WEEK training on {drum roll please...} Kagan. So of course, now that I have a new tool in my tool box, I want to use it to all of the time. I have fully enjoyed doing it and working with my kids on classbuilders and teambuilders.

After all that, and writing this so late at night- I want to show you what I've gotten myself into.

So every day, I work with about 7 kids who are in triple I or Intensive Intervention. Then I have about 5 kids who leave my classroom to go to another teacher for Intervention. I am left with 9 kids who are required to just read...? Well I felt bad that they are literally sitting there reading for about an hour and a half. I decided to put them in groups. WHAT ARE THEY DOING IN GROUPS? I kept asking myself. After many avenues like daily 5 or modifying it for daily 3 I came across something else. I felt that with only these 9 kids, I could do this group work. I created a Book Study for each of the groups. Now I want to show you what I've done...

This is the table of contents of each assignment. Also, it has the benchmarks included.

This is one of the pages that I used for connecting poetry to the story.

There are 3 questions for each chapter.

This is to help the students work on Themes for the book.

Just like the questions for each chapter, there are vocabulary words.

If you enjoy these, I will make custom book studies for you. If you would like to see what I have so far done, then check out my TeachersPayTeachers account!